Blackened bodies, mothers who couldn’t recognize their charred children and those still alive screaming with pain  these are horrific details the survivors of nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recall ahead of 70th anniversary of the tragedy.

The US was the first nation to use nuclear weapons against an enemy target when they dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II on August 6 and 9, 1945.

More than 80,000 civilians died immediately as a result of the Hiroshima bomb  a device nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ by the US Air Force  and other 80,000 were believed killed in the Nagasaki attack by ‘Fat Man’. Thousands died from radiation sickness in the months and years following the blasts.

As of August 2014 the memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki list the names of more than 450,000 people who died in the tragedy: 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki.

Smoke billows over Nagasaki, Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city in this August 9, 1945

It was the children who recognize their mothers

Chiyoko Kuwabara, a survivor of Hiroshima atomic bombing, told RT that she was only 13 years old when the tragedy happened but the moments that changed her life forever still “linger in her memory.”

“There were corpses all over the place and when a mother would walk looking for her kids she sometimes would hear cries calling ‘mom…mom…’ But even if they look at their children’s faces they couldn`t recognize them. It was the children who recognize their mothers,” Kuwabara said with tears in her eyes.

People like Kuwabara are called Hibakusha in Japan  a term for those who were exposed to radiation from the nuclear bombings.

Kuwabara led RT team to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which displays the horrors of the atomic bombing of the city: the damages caused by the bomb as well as photos of dying or dead people.

“It makes me suffer to look at these pictures… Poor people…I think they all died,” she says, looking at the photos.

Kuwabara told RT that she feels disappointed by the current US administration of President Barack Obama.

"He [Obama] said he will reduce the nuclear weapons. Instead he is increasing it. Whatever beautiful words or acts he does I think America is not acting with sincerity. At least he should come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and pay respects.”

RT also spoke to a survivor of atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Sumiteru Taniguchi, who back in August 9, 1945 was delivering mail when a bomb fell on the city.

Atomic bomb victim Sumiteru Taniguchi shows his back which was severely burnt by the atomic bomb next to a photo of him taken about half a year after the incident at his home in Nagasaki

Parts of my body hardened and the ribs got into my heart and lungs

Atomic bomb victim Sumiteru Taniguchi shows his back which was severely burnt by the atomic bomb next to a photo of him taken about half a year after the incident at his home in Nagasaki

“I was 16 years old. Two kilometers from the epicenter I was walking and got the blast from behind. I could see it was from behind the light I was thrown,” Sumiteru Taniguchi told RT.

The heat from the blast melted the skin on his back and left arm.

The footage of his horrific injuries has become iconic and Taniguchi is now a living symbol of the suffering caused by the bombs.

The 86-year-old said that after the explosion he stayed in hospital three years and seven months and during his first year and nine months he was lying on his chest.

“My back was completely burned to the bones. And parts of my body hardened and the ribs got into my heart and lungs. It is very painful still today.”

One more survivor of the Nagasaki bombings, Sanae Ikeda, 82, recalls how he lost his brothers and a sister in the tragedy.

“The explosion took away the skin of my hand and I started to bleed. The light was green and then I couldn't see anything.”

Japanese air raid workers carry a victim of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima away from smoking ruins in this August 6, 1945

This was the body of my little sister

Ikeda recalls horrible moment he saw the body of his sister which was completely deformed by the explosion.

“I found this body completely black, charred. I held it with my hands and it had no face. Then I found that the string or ribbon of the waist of her pants. The outer part was all burned by the explosion, but inside the ribbon it was fine. I saw the little flowers and I could tell that this was the body of my little sister.”

The bombings were approved by then US President Harry S Truman, who repeatedly stated that attacking Japan had saved lives on both sides.

“I think that the bombs were believed at the time to be necessary. As General [George] Marshall, who was head of the US military during the war said after the war, ‘we didn’t want to have to invade Japan,’” Richard Rhodes, an American historian, journalist and author who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’, told RT.

“We knew we would kill many Japanese, and many Americans would die as well,” he added.

But according to Peter Kuznick, professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, the atomic bomb “wasn’t necessary at all” to end the World War II.

“I think you can’t come to any other conclusion than the bomb wasn’t necessary, the Soviet invasion was going to end the war, and the US invasion was not going to begin till November first, so we dropped the bomb on August 6 and 9 to avoid an invasion that was not going to take place for three more months. Why do we do it? Well you have to conclude that we wanted to do it.”

He added that if you look at the comments of US leaders at that time, “in fact, six or seven 5-star admirals and generals who got their fifth star during the war [WWII] are on record as saying that the bomb was either militarily unnecessary morally reprehensible or both.”

The cloud travelled to a great height first in the form of a ball, then mushroomed.

Franklin Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don't

Japan protest against nuclear radiation

In November 1941, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move.

When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.

At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus:

“The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

As Grew had predicted, Japan, a 'hara-kiri nation,' proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated

Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead:

It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”

Boy soldiers being treated at the temporary home.

Masahito Hirose in September 1944

He lost his cousin in the Nagasaki blast

Masahito Hirose was 15 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. During the war he worked in the office of the Mitsubishi shipyard factory.

In the early morning of 9 August, 1945, an air raid warning was issued at about 8 o'clock, but as no planes appeared in the sky above Nagasaki, the alarm was cancelled about an hour later.

So most citizens came out of air raid shelters, children rushed out of caves and housewives started to queue up outside shops to draw their rations of rice.

Many people started work in factories, hospitals and company buildings.

At about 11 o'clock I was working in the office of the factory as usual.

I suddenly saw a white-blue flash and then a sound came — it hit me. I threw myself to the floor and covered my eyes with three fingers, ears with my thumbs and nose with my little fingers, as I'd been taught by my teacher. The next moment many pieces of glass fell down on my back.

After a while all became quiet. I got up and rushed out of the office. Suddenly I saw a cloud climbing up above the northern district of Nagasaki. I could see this gigantic cloud climbing up and up like a tornado. I didn't know what to do so I stood there for a long time, looking at the cloud.

My house was about 3.1km (2 miles) from the bomb's hypocentre.

Mr Hirose still lives in Nagasaki

That morning I'd left the house with my cousin. He was 19 years old. He had left his own house in Osaka [after it was bombed] and came to live in my house in May of that year.

I left the house with him at about 7 o'clock. I parted with him — and he turned right, towards his factory, which was near the hypocentre.

That night he did not come home. But we could not go and find him in the northern part of the city.

On the afternoon of 10 August, his mother left the house to look for him. That night she came back and said: 'I didn't find him anywhere. Around his factory everything has been destroyed and I couldn't find the factory.'

She went out to look for her son the next day and the next day, and she continued to go out to look for him.

On the morning of 15 August she couldn't get out of bed. She had a high temperature and she was bleeding from her nose.

The atomic bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert at 05:29:45 local time on 16 July, 1945, "lit up the entire world".

That is how Private Daniel Yearout, one of the few remaining eyewitnesses some 60 years on, recalls the morning the powers of the atom were first unleashed.

One eyewitness said it was as if someone had turned the sun on with a switch.

Picture: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Asked for his first thought after the test, top scientist J Robert Oppenheimer quoted from his favourite Hindu poem, The Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Oppenheimer and other world-leading scientists who had taken part in the top-secret test knew that from that moment on, the world had changed forever.

For others who were involved, such as Private Yearout, it would be some time before they fully realised what had taken place.

The world would not know the full secret until 6 August, when the Japanese town of Hiroshima was bombed.

Daniel Yearout, a 25-year-old army private with the US Corps of Engineers, was deployed close to what became known as "Ground Zero" on that morning in July.

In 1945, Private Yearout was based at Los Alamos, the secret town that the US government had built during the war in the remote hills of New Mexico. It was here that a laboratory was established to design a nuclear weapon that the army hoped would win World War II.

Some 8,000 people lived and worked in the town — scientists and their families, engineers, technicians, secretaries and army personnel.

They had more or less disappeared from the world and set up their own communities.

While each played their part, few fully understood the magnitude of the work that went on there.

"The Los Alamos project was the best secret there's ever been," says Mr Yearout, who now lives in Waverly, Tennessee.

The 19 kiloton plutonium bomb code-named 'The Gadget' was detonated on top of a 100-foot steel tower, which vaporised during the explosion.

Picture: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Deployed in the desert

On Saturday 14 July, 1945, Private Yearout and other members of the US Corps of Engineers left their base to take part in a "top-secret mission".

Daniel Yearout was based at the secret town of Los Alamos during the war.

"No one knew where we were going or what was going to happen," Mr Yearout told the BBC News Website.

The officers were given telephone numbers to call along the way to find out where to go to next.

The convoy travelled some 200 miles into the desert to a place called Alamorgordo, about 18 miles from "Ground Zero".

They had been stationed in case the small communities in the probable fallout path needed to be evacuated.

"We were called out the night before. One of the officers told us we were going to take part in some testing," says Mr Yearout. "He said that if everything went well, the war would be over in a few days. But, then he said that if it all went wrong, 'it was each damn man for himself'."

Early on Monday morning Private Yearout and a few of his colleagues climbed a hill. They had been told it would be the safest place to be.

The day of the actual test began with an early morning thunderstorm. "There was someone running a camera up on the hill. We lay there and talked to him for a bit. The test was supposed to take place at around 0400 but was delayed because of the weather."

Shortly before 0530, half an hour before sunrise, the scientists went to bunkers six miles from the test site and put on sunglasses and sunscreen. The test began and the sky was lit up by an unnatural ball of fire.

"I don't remember whether I was standing up or lying against the fence," says Mr Yearout.

The cloud travelled to a great height first in the form of a ball, then mushroomed, then changed into a long trailing chimney-shaped column.

Picture: Los Alamos National Laboratory

"Suddenly, without any sound, the whole world lit up.

When I came to my senses, I was lying on the ground with my back to where the light was coming from.

I put my hands over my eyes to protect them and I could see the bones in my fingers.

It was as if I was looking at an X-ray.

The test was code-named Trinity, supposedly after a poem by John Donne which begins: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God"

"I whisked around and looked towards the light.

"I could hear a rumble and the Earth shook.

"I saw a big fireball rising in the sky — it looked like it was pouring gasoline out there, all the way around.

"The fireball was getting bigger and bigger and we just stood and watched.

"This was followed by a long rumbling — I'd say it went on for 10 minutes. In and out and round the mountains. The fire began going down and then I saw a swirl of black smoke rising in the sky.

"I was scared at the time. I didn't know what was going on. I remember the man running the camera beside us hollering that it was the most beautiful picture he had ever taken in his life — he said it maybe 25 times. All he was interested in was the picture and all I was wondering was if we were going to get out of there or not."

Eventually the men went back down the hill to their tents and started a game of poker. Radiation readings stayed at what was then considered safe levels and no one needed to be evacuated.

"No one was allowed to talk about what we saw," says Mr Yearout. "Anyone who did was shipped out pretty quickly."

The flash released four times the heat of the interior of the sun and was seen 250 miles away. But, so secret was the mission — codenamed Trinity — that local media were told that an ammunition dump had blown up on an army base in the area.

In Potsdam outside Berlin, President Harry Truman waited for the coded message that the bomb had been successful.

Mr Yearout says Trinity paved the way for bringing an end to the war and saving many American and Japanese lives. "If we had gone into Japan, we would have encountered the worst fighting we ever had ever seen. We would have been there for four to six years."

But 60 years on, debate still rages over whether the bomb was really necessary to force the Japanese to surrender.

A number of the scientists involved in the project ended up feeling extremely ambivalent about the bomb's use, and some went on to campaign against nuclear arms.

For Mr Yearout, Trinity remains one of the 20th Century's most significant achievements.

"I was glad I'd seen it," he says. "But I hope I don't see another one."

Letter of thanks from the War Department written a day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

Akiko Seitelbach gave first aid to the victims

Akiko Seitelbach was 22 years old, and working at Mitsubishi Electrical as a volunteer, when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.

On 9 August 1945, I was working in the supply office.

I was a little tired, so I got up to stretch my legs and walked over to the end of the office where there was a big window looking over Nagasaki harbour.

The scenery was beautiful, the sun was shining brightly and I was looking across the bay.

Then suddenly I saw this flash of light, above the railway station, and my boss yelled at me: 'Get away from the window!'

So I turned and tried to walk back to my desk.

Then suddenly the building was hit with such force it was like a small boat in a storm — it shook.

And I threw myself face down on the floor to cover my head with my hands, something we were trained to do.

A shockwave came and the air was filled with acrid dust.

The building kept shaking, and things were falling on my body and head.

My mother had died the year before and I prayed to her.

Then after a while it stopped, so I got up and looked around.

The air was still filled with yellow dust and I ran downstairs towards the air raid shelter.

I ran through the factory. I felt something was very wrong — it was so bright. When I got to the shelter it was dark, as the electricity had gone, but I could feel people moving around.

My boss came and found me and said: 'Oh you are safe.' He said: 'They are calling for you — you volunteered to do first aid.'

So I said, 'Oh heavens I did!' I got up and went to the other end of the air raid shelter. There was a doctor, and although he was wounded, he was also trying to help other people.

People were sort of dazed, their clothes torn to shreds, their bodies burned and just standing there silently.

The doctor pointed out one man. All his clothes were torn and his body was covered in burns. He was shivering and said: 'I'm cold, I'm cold'. So I put some ointment on him, but I thought: 'This isn't going to help.'

Then the doctor said: 'Go and stay with that young boy on the makeshift bed.'

They used high school kids as volunteers in the factories. He must have been about 15. He had a big gash on his neck. He opened his eyes and said: 'You know I'm going to die.'

I said: 'Your mother's coming, you're not going to die.' He said: 'Can't you hear my blood dripping? I know I'm going to die.' Then he was gone.

Altered landscape

Later on, at about 5pm, my boss suggested we try to get home. I didn't know it had been an atomic explosion.

We walked out of the shelter, passed the destruction and onto the road in front of our building. I knew something was very wrong, something terrible had happened.

Akiko Seitelbach now lives in New Jersey U.S.

I looked out across the bay, and Nagasaki was a big bonfire, just burning, and then I thought about Hiroshima.

I thought: 'Maybe it's one of the new bombs.'

But I didn't have any feelings about that.

When you're shocked you don't feel anything.

I wasn't even scared.

We couldn't get our bearings because all the familiar landmarks had disappeared.

And when we ran through the roads between houses still burning on both sides, the scorching heat nearly overwhelmed us.

I didn't see any living creatures or green plants. We ran and ran through these empty spaces.

Then suddenly I stopped.

Something was coming toward me. It was a man but he didn't look like a man. He had no hair, his face was swollen to about twice the normal size, and loose skin hung down from his arms and legs like seaweed.

He was walking towards me and I was so scared I tried to avoid him.

I heard him saying 'Water, water' as he passed me.

So I turned around to go to him but he had collapsed, dead.

This interview is from the series 'August 1945'BBC commemoration 2005

Friday, 15 July, 2005

I felt elated, because of a job well done

By Claire Marshall

BBC News, New Mexico

In the blazing July heat, thousands of people have made their way in to the parched New Mexico desert to visit the so-called "Trinity Site".

The Trinity nuclear bomb test

The day before he had worked all day at the foot of the steel tower from which the bomb was suspended, putting the final touches to equipment which would help to measure the blast.

Bad weather delayed the detonation, and it was not until just before dawn that he witnessed the explosion.

"I felt elated, because of a job well done," he told the BBC. "I knew that the war would soon be over."

The explosion had completely vaporised the steel tower Mr Hall had been working in the shadow of.

Now 80, he looked through his dark glasses at the tourists in t-shirts, trainers and baseball caps taking photos of each other, and then at the children squinting up at the monument.

"It was worth it," he said.

'Just doing my job'

The test was code-named Trinity, supposedly after a poem by John Donne which begins:

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God"

Blue-green pebbles can be found on the ground.

They have been named Trinitite.

Trinitite was formed when the heat pulse from the explosion fused the desert sand into glass.

"Sooner or later someone would have got this weapon. It ended up saving many lives, including Japanese lives."

I asked him how he felt about working on something that had changed the world.

His response was modest: "I didn't really think about it I just had my job to do".

Some residents in the nearby town of Socorro still remember the day of the detonation.

Dave Wade was nine years old at the time.

"The blast shook all the windows out of the house," he said in a deep southern accent.

"My dad was looking out and he said that the sky turned a mint green. It stayed that way for maybe one or two minutes.

"We didn't know what was going on it was very secret back in those days."

'Still suffering'

Younger locals are not sure what to make of the controversial legacy lying just down the road.

Michael Curry, in his twenties and also from Socorro, came to the Trinity site for the first time this year.

"I don't know whether to think 'wow, cool', or whether to think it's horrible to be praising this. It is history, though."

Some feel this is a tragic anniversary, arguing that the world has been living with the threat of annihilation ever since the Trinity test took place.

Shigeko Sasamori was 13 when the bomb exploded over her home city of Hiroshima.

She was severely burned on more than half her body, and her face had to be entirely reconstructed.

Shigeko came to New Mexico to campaign against nuclear arms.

Surrounded by peaceniks holding flowers and banners, she said:

"The survivors are still suffering from leukaemia and other cancers.

"I am here to beg them not to build any more of such weapons, and to destroy the ones they have".

Concerning the Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Ironically, prior to the bomb exploding nearly directly over the Urakami Cathedral at 11:02 AM, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan, and the massive cathedral was the largest Christian church in the Orient.

Those baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with an astonishing number of near-fatal glitches in the mission.

Most of us Americans would have done what the crew did if we had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew.

And, if we had never seen, heard or smelled the suffering humanity that the bomb caused on the ground, and if we had been treated as heroes in the aftermath, most of us would have experienced no remorse for our participation in what was retrospectively universally regarded as a war crime.

So it must be that this system, set long before we are born, a system set since Sumer, since the city ancient, Eridu, since Enki, his later name Ea, our ‘Lord of Earth’ as Ea was proclaimed then.

So it must be that systems of taxation, set before we have any physical recording  since Atlantis and Mu and before, existence of souls in bodies mingling and associating  that systems of taxation, of giving a few our wealth to use, is the Enslavement Dream!

A purpose not for good, but power. For a few!

And look to what it has become.

Not only the ability to kill vast numbers of people by pressing a knob on a machine  horrendous power the few who we have given such power should never have.

But a power to get into mind?

Has it come to this, that these few that control government now have this power?

The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests — 217 in the atmosphere.

The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests — 219 in the atmosphere.

France, 210 tests, 50 in the atmosphere.

The United Kingdom, 45 tests — 21 in the atmosphere.

China, 45 tests — 23 in the atmosphere.

India and Pakistan — 13 tests underground.

Israel — possible 1 test atmosphere South Africa 1979.

North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006.

“The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran.”

“The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities.”

The burnt street ... looking toward North West from the explosion center.

Governments lie.
— I. F. Stone, Journalist

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press.

Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world's media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur's orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war.

The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed.

Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts.

He saw people's shadows seared into walls and sidewalks.

He met people with their skin melting off.

In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss.

Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

The patterns of clothes burnt by the heat rays.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began:

"In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

Burchett's article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett's candid reaction to the horror shocked readers.

"In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

"When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction."

Burchett's searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists' access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror.

The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there.

Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur's censors, "They won."

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett's revelations: They attacked the messenger.

General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness.

The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

A-bomb sufferers who have escaped to Miyuki Bridge (about 2km. from the explosion center)

Four days after Burchett's story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico.

Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.

Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site.

Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military's line; the general was not

Laurence's front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors.

The article began. 3

"This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity."

Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended "to give the lie to these claims."

Laurence quoted General Groves:

"The Japanese claim that people died from radiation.

If this is true, the number was very small."

Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened:

"The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

Persons cremating bodies at the ruins.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons.

The intent, according to the Times, was "to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb's operating principles in laymen's language." Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, "his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence," as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting.

Evans recounted: "After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as 'hoax or propaganda.' The Times' Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett's reports, and parroted the government line." Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.

"Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department's official press release for worldwide distribution," boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. "No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter."

"Atomic Bill" Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

The ruins of Hatchobori and its vicinity (700-800m. from the explosion center).

In Laurence's article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people.

Laurence waxed:

"Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb:

"Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural."

Laurence was good at keeping his master's secrets-from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan.

The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence's dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon.

As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, "Here was the nation's leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time."

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don't

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.)

Unlike the War Department's Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)

W.H. Lawrence's original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that "all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb's lingering effects."

He described how "persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died."

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN.

For this article, the Pentagon's spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett's horrifying account of "atomic plague."

W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department's atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, "denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity."

Lawrence's dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist.

On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty.

A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.

The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times "regretted the lapses" of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty's work was "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty's "credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda."

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty's award, concluding that there was "no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception" in the articles that won the prize.

As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the "deliberate deception" of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon's paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of "uncritical parroting of propaganda"-as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima's apologist be stripped.

Published on Tuesday, August 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show "Democracy Now!."

Smoke billows over Nagasaki, Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city in this August 9, 1945 photo.

The wing of the airplane is visible at right.

Two U.S. Air Force planes participated in the Nagasaki mission, one to carry the bomb and the other to act as escort.

The bomb, nicknamed 'Fat Man', exploded about 500 metres above ground, instantly killing about 27,000 of the city's estimated population of around 200,000.

Three days earlier on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber called 'Enola Gay' dropped a 10,000-pound uranium 235 bomb on Hiroshima, instantly killing about 78,000 people.

American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945.

Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation’s General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed.

Weller’s stories, written in September 1945, can be found below.

NAGASAKI, Sept.8 — The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.

The following conclusions were made by the writer — as the first visitor to inspect the ruins — after an exhaustive, though still incomplete study of this wasteland of war.

Nagasaki is an island roughly resembling Manhattan in size and shape, running in north and south direction with ocean inlets on both sides, what would be the New Jersey and Manhattan sides of the Hudson river are lined with huge-war plants owned by the Mitsubishi and Kawanami families.

The Kawanami shipbuilding plants, employing about 20,000 workmen, lie on both sides of the harbor mouth on what corresponds to battery park and Ellis island. That is about five miles from the epicenter of the explosion.

B-29 raids before the Atomic bomb failed to damage them and they are still hardly scarred.

Proceeding up the Nagasaki harbor, which is lined with docks on both sides like the Hudson, one perceives the shores narrowing toward a bottleneck. The beautiful green hills are nearer at hand, standing beyond the long rows of industrial plants, which are all Mitsubishi on both sides of the river.

On the left, or Jersey side, two miles beyond the Kawanami yards are Mitsubishi’s shipbuilding and electrical engine plants employing 20,000 and 8,000 respectively.

The shipbuilding plant damaged by a raid before the atomic bomb, but not badly.

The electrical plant is undamaged. It is three miles from the epicenter of the atomic bomb and repairable.

It is about two miles from the scene of the bomb’s 1,500 feet high explosion where the harbor has narrowed to 250 foot wide Urakame River that the atomic bomb’s force begins to be discernible.

This area is north of downtown Nagasaki, whose buildings suffered some freakish destruction, but are generally still sound.

Known dead 20,000

The railroad station, destroyed except for the platforms is already operating. Normally it is sort of a gate to the destroyed part of the Urakame valley. In parallel north and south lines? here the Urakame river, Mitsubishi plants on both sides, the railroad line and the main road from town.

For two miles stretches a line of congested steel and some concrete factories with the residential district "across the tracks. The atomic bomb landed between and totally destroyed both with half (illegible) living persons in them. The known dead-number 20,000 police tell me they estimate about 4,000 remain to be found.

The reason the deaths were so high — the wounded being about twice as many according to Japanese official figures — was twofold:

1. Mitsubishi air raid shelters were totally inadequate and the civilian shelters remote and limited.

2. That the Japanese air warning system was a total failure.

Nagasaki 1909

I inspected half a dozen crude short tunnels in the rock wall valley which the Mitsubishi Co., considered shelters.

I also picked my way through the tangled iron girders and curling roofs of the main factories to see concrete shelters four inches thick but totally inadequate in number.

Only a grey concrete building topped by a siren, where the clerical staff had worked had reasonable cellar shelters, but nothing resembling the previous had been made.

A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before two B-29’s appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen and most of the population.

The police insist that the air raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.

As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon.

The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation.

But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation.

Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash and a more powerful knock-out.

All around the Mitsubishi plant are ruins which one would gladly have spared.

The writer spent nearly an hour in 15 deserted buildings in the Nagasaki Medical Institute hospital which (illegible).

Nothing but rats live in the debris choked halls. On the opposite side of the valley and the Urakame river is a three story concrete American mission college called Chin Jei, nearly totally destroyed.

View of Nagasaki after the bombing

Homes flattened traditionally place of Catholic and Christian Japanese

Japanese authorities point out that the home area flattened by American bombs was traditionally the place of Catholic and Christian Japanese.

But sparing these and sparing the allied prison camp, which the Japanese placed next to an armor plate factory would have meant sparing Mitsubishi’s ship parts plant with 1,016 employees who were mostly Allied.

It would have spared a Mounting factory connecting with 1,750 employees.

It would have spared three steel foundries on both sides of the Urakame, using ordinarily 3,400 but that day 2,500.

And besides sparing many sub-contracting plants now flattened it would have meant leaving untouched the Mitsubishi torpedo and ammunition plant employing 7,500 and which was nearest where the bomb up.

All these latter plants today are hammered flat.

But no saboteur creeping among the war plants of death could have placed the atomic bomb by hand more scrupulously given Japan’s inertia about common defense.

NAGASAKI, Saturday, Sept.8 (odn) — In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki.

Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast’s center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way.

The human beings whom it has happened to spare sit on (illegible) One tiny family board their platforms in Nagasaki’s two largest (illegible) hospitals, their shoulders, arms and faces are strapped in bandages.

Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to knew: "What do you think?"

brothers

Did America do something inhuman?

What this question means is: do you intend saying that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.

Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none of showing signs of pain.

They moan softly

Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly.

One woman caring for her husband, shows eyes dim with tears.

It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.

Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general physicians and one X-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information and opinion on the victims. Statistics are variable and few records are kept.

But it is ascertained that this chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.

About 70 percent of the deaths have been from plain burns.

The Japanese say that anyone caught outdoors in a mile by half-mile area was burned to death.

But this is known to be untrue because most of the allied prisoners burned in the plant escaped and only about one-fourth were burned.

Yet it is undoubtedly true that many at 11:02 o’clock on this morning of Aug. 9 were caught in debris by casual fires which kindled and caught during the next half hour.

But most of the patients who were gravely burned have now passed away and those on hand are rapidly curing.

Those not curing are people whose unhappy lot provides the mystery aura around the atomic bomb’s effects.

They are victims of what Lt. Jakob Vink, Dutch medical officer and now allied commandant of prison camp 14 at the mouth of Nagasaki harbor calls "disease."

Vink himself was in the allied prison kitchen abutting the Mitsubishi armor plate department when the ceiling fell in but he escaped this mysterious "disease X" which some allied prisoners and many Japanese civilians got.

She was well for three weeks, now she lies moaning

Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in hospital, who according to hospital doctors Hikodero (sic) Koga and Uraaji (sic) Hayashida have just been brought in.

She fled the atomic area but returned to live. She was well for three weeks exept a small burn on the heel.

Now she lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words.

Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red spots in patches.

Near her lies a 15-year-old fattish girl who has the same blotchy red pinpoints and nose clotted with blood.

A little farther on is a window lying down with four children, from one to about 8, around her.

The two smallest children have lost some hair.

Though none of these people has either a barn or a broken limb, they are presumed victims of the atomic bomb.

Dr. Uraji Hayashida shakes his head somberly and says that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned.

But his next statement knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the widow’s family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.

According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late developing symptoms are dying now a month after the bombs fall, at the rate of about 10 daily.

The three doctors calmly stated that the disease has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment whatever but rest.

Radio rumors from America received the same consideration with the symptoms under their noses.

They are licked for cure and do not seem very worried about it.

NAGASAKI, Sept.8 (cdn) — More pieces to the broken mosaic of history are supplied by prisoners in the liberated, but still unrelieved camps on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island.

While waiting for Gen. Walter Krueger’s army to arrive, the inmates are receiving humble bows and salutes from the Japanese officers who formerly ruled them with an iron red.

By exchanging visits with prisoners from other parts of Kyushu they are able to find out what happened in the blacked out periods of the past.

View of Nagasaki after the bombing

Camp No. 14 which was inside Mitsubishi war factory area until the atomic bomb fell there is now moved inside the eastern mouth of the Nagasaki harbor.

Here you can meet Fireman Edward Matthews of Everett, Washington and the American destroyer Pope.

He fills in the unknown story of how the Pope fought trying to take the cruiser Houston through the Sunda straits in the face of a Japanese task force of "eight cruisers and endless destroyers.

"We contacted the Japs at seven in the morning. They opened fire at 8:30 a.m. We held out until 2 p.m., when a Jap spotter plane dropped a bomb near out stern and watched us go down.

A Jap destroyer saw us sink.

It was a perfectly clear day.

They let us stay in the water — 154 men with one 24 man whaleboat and one life raft — for three days. We were about crazy when they picked us up and took us to Macassar."

From Camp No. 3 at Tabata near Mojie in northern Kyushu come three ex-prisoners who have found the lure of the open roads irresistible after three years confinement and have come to Nagasaki in order to view the results of the atomic bomb.

Charles Gellings of North East, Md., says, "The Houston was caught on the eastern side or Java side of Sunda. It was in the straits near Bantan Bay. Three hundred and forty-eight were saved, but they were all scattered."

Chicago born Miles Mahnke, Plane, Ill., who looks all right, though his original 215 pounds dropped to 160, says, "I was, in the death march at Bataan. Guess you know what that was."

Here is Albert Rupp of the submarine Grenadier, who lives at 920 Belmont av., Philadelphia, "We were chasing two Nip cargo boats 450 miles off Penang. A spotter plane dropped a bomb on us hitting the maneuvering room. We lay on the bottom, but the next time came up we were bombed again. We finally had to scuttle the sub. Thirty-nine men of forty-two were saved."

Also from the submarine is William Cunningham, 4225 Webster av. Bronx N.Y., who started with Rupp on his tour of southern Japan.

August 1945 photo from captured Japanese film shows victims of the atomic bomb who were thrown clear of a tramcar they were riding into a ditch near the the tracks, when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Another party of four vagabond prisoners from camps whose Japanese commanders and guards have simply disappeared, are Albert Johnson, Geneva, Ohio; Hershel Langston, Van Buren, Kans., Morris Kellogg, Mule Shoe, Tex., all crew members of the oil tanker Connecticut, now touring Japan with a carefree marine from North China Guard at Peking, Walter Allan, Waxahachie, Tex.

The three members from the oil tanker would like a word with the Captain of the German raider who took them prisoner.

The captain told them that "in the last war you Americans confined Germans in Japan; this war we Germans are going to take you Americans to Japan and see how you like a taste of the same medicine."

Kyushu has about 10,000 prisoners, or about one-third the total is all Japan, mixed in the completely disordered fashion, the Japanese used and without any records.

At Camp No.2, by the entrance to Nagasaki Bay are 68 survivors of the British Cruiser Exeter which sank in the Java Sea battle while trying to expel the Japanese task force. Eight inch shells penetrated her waterline.

Five of the supposed total of nine survivors from the British destroyer the Stronghold, sunk near the Sunda straits at the same time are also here.

There are also 14 Britons of an approximate 100 from the destroyer Encounter lost at the same time, besides 62 R.A.F. mostly from Java and Singapore.

Among 324 Dutch cruisers the Java and De Ruyter were sunk at 2300 the night of Feb. 27, 1942 by torpedo attacks which the Japs boasted were staged not by destroyers or submarines, but cruisers.

There is also a Dutch officer from the Destroyer Koortenaer, torpedoed by night in the Java Sea battle.

Husky Cpl. Raymond Woest, Fredericksburg, Tex., told how remembers of the 131st Field Artillery poured 75 caliber shells into the Japs for six hours outside Soerabaya before Java fell, killing an estimated 700.

To correspondents eager questions about this outfit which had been into action in Java, Wuest said that 450 members (illegible) and were now scattered in the Far East. (illegible) Nagasaki, whereof most were moved to Camp No. 9 (at least one further sentence follows, but it is illegible.)

Atomic bomb’s peculiar disease

NAGASAKI, Sept.9 (cdn) — The atomic bomb’s peculiar "disease," uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.

Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.

The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer — the first Allied observer to Nagasaki since the surrender — that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes.

Kyushu’s leading X-ray specialist, who arrived today from the island’s chief city Fukuoka, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima, told the writer that he is convinced that these people are simply suffering from the atomic bomb’s beta Gamma, or the neutron ray is taking effect.

"All the symptoms are similar," said the Japanese doctor. "You have a reduction in white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhea and small hemorrhages just below the skin. All of these things happen when an overdose of Roentgen rays is given. Bombed children’s hair falls out. That is natural because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose."

Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked the regiment to close off a bombed area claiming that returned refugees are infected from the ground by lethal rays.

"I believe that any after effect out there is negligible. I mean to make tests soon with an electrometer," said the specialist.

A suggestion by Dutch doctor Lt. Jakob Vink, taken prisoner and now commander of the allied prison camp here, that the drug (illegible) which increased white corpuscles be tried brought the answer from Nakashima that it would be "useless, because the grave (illegible).

At emergency hospital No. 2, commanding officer young Lt. Col. Yoshitaka Sasaki, with three rows of campaign ribbons on his breast, stated that 200 patients died of 343 admitted and that the expects about 50 more deaths.

Almost exclusively 'disease' cases

Most severe ordinary burns resulted in the patients (sic) deaths within a week after the bomb fell. But this hospital began taking patients only from one to two weeks afterward. It is therefore almost exclusively "disease" cases and the deaths are mostly therefrom.

Nakashima divides the deaths outside simple burns and fractures into two classes on the basis of symptoms observed in the post mortem autopsies.

The first class accounts for roughly 60 percent of the deaths, the second for 40 percent.

Among exterior symptoms in the first class are, falling hair from the head, armpits and public zones, spotty local skin hemorrhages looking like measles all over the body, lip sores, diarrhea but without blood discharge, swelling in the throat (illegible) of the epiglottis and retropharynx and a descent in number of red and white corpuscles.

Red corpuscles fall from a normal 5,000,000 to one-half, or one-third while the white’s almost disappear, dropping from 7,000 or 8,000 to 300 to 500.

Fever rises to 104 and stays there without fluctuating.

Intestines choked with blood

Interior symptoms of the first class revealed in the postmortems seems to show the intestines choked with blood which Nakashima thinks occurs a few hours before death.

The stomach is also blood choked, also mesenterium. Blood spots appear in the bone narrow and bus-arachnoydeal, oval blood (illegible) on the brain which, however, is not affected. Going up part of the intestines have a little blood, but the congestion is mainly in (illegible) down passages.

Nakashima considers that it is possible that the atomic bomb’s rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray burns. But second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever.

Suddenly get worse

Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse.

They come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims.

Up to five days from the torn to the worse, they die.

Their bloodstream has not thinned as in first class and their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But they are dead — dead of atomic bomb — and nobody knows why.

Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive Sept. 11 to study the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for Disease X.

A kilometer from the epicenter Sakue Shimohira ten years old suddenly felt a blinding flash.

It was too enormous and intense...

NAHA, JAPAN — Fumiko Nakamura, a 91-year-old former public school teacher, can't shake the profound remorse she feels for the loss of her students during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

Before Okinawa, a subtropical island in the Pacific, was turned into a killing field 60 years ago, Ms. Nakamura used to exhort her students to fight for the emperor and for the state.

Her students were among more than 200,000 people, including 12,520 Americans, who perished during the Battle of Okinawa, which started in March 1945.

As an elementary-school teacher, Nakamura played a part in that indoctrination. "In class [she] used to ask all of us if we could die for the state," recalls Fumiko Toyama, a student of Nakamura in 1937. "Whenever our 'yes' was not loud enough, she'd snap, 'Speak up!' "

She is deeply ashamed of her involvement in the war.

"I will carry this sin as long as I live," she says.

Private Yutaka Nakagawa was a 20-year-old soldier and veteran of the Indonesia campaign, stationed in Hiroshima when the bomb fell on 6 August 1945.

I was in the barracks on the night of the 5 August.

There was a warning of an air-raid.

But I was in bed.

A B29 was flying over the city and dropped hundreds of leaflets.

The leaflets said Japan would be defeated.

The officers said don't touch the leaflets — they could be poisoned.

Our officers collected them up so we didn't read them.

Mr Yutaka was conscripted at 19 and fought in Indonesia

On the night of the 5 August there were warnings of air raids so I had to take our unit's communications equipment to a bunker 2km from our barracks.

All through the night I was moving this equipment so in the morning I was allowed to rest. When the bomb fell I was asleep. But when I awoke I saw the aftermath — some of my fellow soldiers were horribly burned.

In the city, the citizens of Hiroshima were trying to reach the Ota river to drink water.

The banks of the rivers were covered with dead bodies.

Cries for water

Some time later I returned to the barracks. Inside the barracks were civilian victims, lying on the ground.

When I approached they cried out for water but our officers said: 'Don't give them water — if you do that they'll die immediately'.

But there was a pond inside the barracks — water reserved for fire-fighting — I saw black, burned bodies in the water — it was like a nightmare.

Even now I cannot believe the things that I saw.

There are lots of memorials in Hiroshima — like the atomic bomb dome — but for me the most vivid image of the atomic bomb is the memory of those burned bodies.

This interview is from the series 'August 1945'BBC commemoration 2005

Survivors of atomic bombings

Mayor Akiba of Hiroshima, Japan, and Mayor Itoh of Nagasaki march along with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and thousands of demonstrators took part in a rally in New York, May 1, 2005.

Several thousand demonstrators marched past the United Nations and onto Central Park for a rally calling for nuclear disarmament and the end of the U.S. Presence in Iraq.

SNC-Lavalin — makers of war material

A stock market tickers flashes market quotes in rear as Toronto police arrest protesters who approached the Toronto Stock Exchange building to demonstrate against SNC Lavalin Group, who was holding their annual meeting of shareholders, May 5, 2005.

Protesters were angry that SNC-Lavalin was producing ammunition components that were being used by the American military in Iraq.

The mayors of the two Japanese cities in question spoke out about a wide "perception gap" between the two countries. {3}

Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima, surmounting a cultural distaste for offending, called the bombings "one of the two great crimes against humanity in the 20th Century, along with the Holocaust". {4}

Defenders of the US action counter that the bomb actually saved lives: It ended the war sooner and obviated the need for a land invasion.

Estimates of the hypothetical saved-body count, however, which range from 20,000 to 1.2 million, owe more to political agendas than to objective projections. {5}

But in any event, defining the issue as a choice between the A-bomb and a land invasion is an irrelevant and wholly false dichotomy.

By 1945, Japan's entire military and industrial machine was grinding to a halt as the resources needed to wage war were all but eradicated.

The navy and air force had been destroyed ship by ship, plane by plane, with no possibility of replacement. When, in the spring of 1945, the island nation's lifeline to oil was severed, the war was over except for the fighting.

By June, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the air attacks, was complaining that after months of terrible firebombing, there was nothing left of Japanese cities for his bombers but "garbage can targets".

By July, US planes could fly over Japan without resistance and bomb as much and as long as they pleased. Japan could no longer defend itself. {6}

After the war, the world learned what US leaders had known by early 1945: Japan was militarily defeated long before Hiroshima.

It had been trying for months, if not for years, to surrender; and the US had consistently ignored these overtures. A May 5 cable, intercepted and decoded by the US, dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace.

Sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Tokyo, after he talked to a ranking Japanese naval officer, it read:

Since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard. {7}

As far as is known, Washington did nothing to pursue this opening.

Later that month, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson almost capriciously dismissed three separate high-level recommendations from within the Truman administration (Roosevelt had just died) to activate peace negotiations.

The proposals advocated signaling Japan that the US was willing to consider the all-important retention of the emperor system; i.e., the US would not insist upon "unconditional surrender". {8}

Stimson, like other high US officials, did not really care in principle whether or not the emperor was retained.

The term "unconditional surrender" was always a propaganda measure; wars are always ended with some kind of conditions.

To some extent the insistence was a domestic consideration — not wanting to appear to "appease" the Japanese.

More important, however, it reflected a desire that the Japanese not surrender before the bomb could be used.

One of the few people who had been aware of the Manhattan Project from the beginning, Stimson had come to think of it as his bomb — "my secret", as he called it in his diary. {9}

On June 6, he told President Truman he was "fearful" that before the A-bombs were ready to be delivered, the Air Force
would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon "would not have a fair background to show its strength". {10}

In his later memoirs, Stimson admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". {11}

In July, before the leaders of the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union met at Potsdam, the Japanese government sent several radio messages to its ambassador, Naotake Sato, in Moscow, asking him to request Soviet help in mediating a peace settlement.

"His Majesty is extremely anxious to terminate the war as soon as possible", said one communication. "Should, however, the United States and Great Britain insist on unconditional surrender, Japan would be forced to fight to the bitter end." {12}

On July 25, while the Potsdam meeting was taking place, Japan instructed Sato to keep meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Molotov to impress the Russians "with the sincerity of our desire to end the war [and] have them understand that we are trying to end hostilities by asking for very reasonable terms in order to secure and maintain our national existence and honor" (a reference to retention of Emperor Hirohito). {1}

Due to code breaking already knew

Having broken the Japanese code years earlier, Washington did not have to wait to be informed by the Soviets of these peace overtures; it knew immediately, and did nothing.

Indeed, the National Archives in Washington contains US government documents reporting similarly ill-fated Japanese peace overtures as far back as 1943. {14}

Thus, it was with full knowledge that Japan was frantically trying to end the war, that President Truman and his hardline Secretary of State, James Byrnes, included the term "unconditional surrender" in the July 26 Potsdam Declaration.

This "final warning" and expression of surrender terms to Japan was in any case a charade.

The day before it was issued, Harry Truman had approved the order to release a 15 kiloton atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. {15}

Many US military officials were less than enthusiastic about the demand for unconditional surrender or use of the atomic bomb.

At the time of Potsdam, Gen. Hap Arnold asserted that conventional bombing could end the war.

Adm. Ernest King believed a naval blockade alone would starve the Japanese into submission.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, convinced that retaining the emperor was vital to an orderly transition to peace, was appalled at the demand for unconditional surrender.

Adm. William Leahy concurred.

Refusal to keep the emperor "would result only in making the Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualty lists," he argued, adding that a nearly defeated Japan might stop fighting if unconditional surrender were dropped as a demand.

At a loss for a military explanation for use of the bomb, Leahy believed that the decision "was clearly a political one", reached perhaps "because of the vast sums that had been spent on the project". {16}

Finally, we have Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's account of a conversation with Stimson in which he told the secretary of war that:

Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.

... I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face".

The secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions. {17}

If, as appears to be the case, the US decision to drop the A-bombs was based on neither the pursuit of the earliest possible peace nor it being the only way to avoid a land invasion, we must look elsewhere for the explanation.

Soviet Union threat not Japan

It has been asserted that dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the Second World War as the first act of the Cold War.

Although Japan was targeted, the weapons were aimed straight to the red heart of the USSR.

For more than 70 years, the determining element of US foreign policy, virtually its sine qua non, has been "the communist factor".

World War II and a battlefield alliance with the Soviet Union did not bring about an ideological change in the anti-communists who owned and ran America. It merely provided a partial breather in a struggle that had begun with the US invasion of Russia in 1918. {18}

It is hardly surprising then, that 25 years later, as the Soviets were sustaining the highest casualties of any nation in World War II, the US systematically kept them in the dark about the A-bomb project, while sharing information with the British.

According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, Secretary of State Byrnes had said that the bomb's biggest benefit was not its effect on Japan but its power to "make Russia more manageable in Europe". {19}

General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project, testified in 1954: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and that the Project was conducted on that basis." {20}

The United States was thinking post-war. A Venezuelan diplomat reported to his government after a May 1945 meeting that Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller "communicated to us the anxiety of the United States Government about the Russian attitude".

US officials, he said, were "beginning to speak of Communism as they once spoke of Nazism and are invoking continental solidarity and hemispheric defense against it". {21}

Used bomb when not militarily necessary. Chilling impression on Russians

Churchill, who had known about the weapon before Truman, understood its use: "Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War," he said about the bomb, and added, thinking of Russian advances into Europe, "and perhaps to much else besides. ... We now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians." {22}

Referring to the immediate aftermath of Nagasaki, Stimson wrote of what came to be known as "atomic diplomacy":

In the State Department there developed a tendency to think of the bomb as a diplomatic weapon.

Outraged by constant evidence of Russian perfidy, some of the men in charge of foreign policy were eager to carry the bomb for a while as their ace-in-the-hole. ... American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip. {23}

"The psychological effect on Stalin [of the bombs] was twofold," observed historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. "The Americans had not only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it was not militarily necessary.

It was this last chilling fact that doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians." {24}

After the Enola Gay released its cargo on Hiroshima on August 6, common sense — common decency wouldn't apply here — would have dictated a pause long enough to allow Japanese officials to travel to the city, confirm the extent of the destruction, and respond before the US dropped a second bomb.

At 11 o'clock in the morning of August 9, Prime Minister Kintaro Suzuki addressed the Japanese Cabinet: "Under the present circumstances I have concluded that our only alternative is to accept the Potsdam Proclamation and terminate the war."

Moments later, the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. {25}

Some hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians died in the two attacks; many more suffered terrible injury and permanent genetic damage.

After the war, His Majesty the Emperor still sat on his throne, and the gentlemen who ran the United States had absolutely no problem with this. They never had.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 concluded:

It seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. {26}

It has been argued, to the present day, that it wouldn't have mattered if the United States had responded to the Japanese peace overtures because the emperor was merely a puppet of the military, and the military would never have surrendered without the use of the A-bombs.

However, "the emperor as puppet" thesis was a creation out of whole cloth by General MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, to justify his personal wish that the emperor not be tried as a war criminal along with many other Japanese officials. {27}

In any event, this does not, and can not, excuse the United States government for not at least trying what was, from humanity's point of view, the clearly preferable option, replying seriously to the Japanese peace overtures.

No matter how much power the military leaders had, the civil forces plainly had the power to put forth the overtures and their position could only have been enhanced by a positive American response.

NOTES
1. Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1988, p.8
2. Ibid., August 3, 1994
3. Ibid., March 16, 1995, p.1
4. Ibid.
5. In June and July 1945, Joint Chiefs of Staff committees predicted that between 20,000 and 46,000 Americans would die in the one or two invasions for which they had drawn contingency plans. While still in office, President Truman usually placed the number at about a quarter of a million, but by 1955 had doubled it to half a million. Winston Churchill said the attacks had spared well over 1.2 million Allies. (Barton Bernstein, "The Myth of Lives Saved by A-bombs," Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1985, IV, p.1; Barton Bernstein, "Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," Diplomatic History, Winter 1993, p.48.)
6. Stewart Udall, The Myths of August (New York, 1994), pp.73, 75; Martin S. Quigley, Peace Without Hiroshima (Lanham, MD, 1991), pp.105-6; Charles L. Mee, Jr., Meeting at Potsdam (New York, 1975), p.76
7. Tim Weiner, "US Spied on its World War II Allies," New York Times, August 11, 1993, p.9
8. Udall, pp.73-79
9. Ibid., p.73. Vice President Truman was never informed about the bomb. After Roosevelt's death, when he assumed office, it was Secretary of State James Byrnes who briefed him on the project. (Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1947). Bundy is recognized as the principal author of these Stimson memoirs.
10. Udall, p.76
11. Stimson, p.629
12. Mee, p.23
13. Ibid., pp.235-6; See also: Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations (US Senate), June 25, 1951, p.3113, for reference to another peace overture.
14. Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1995, p.5
15. Mee, p.239
16. Ibid., pp.75, 78-9; and William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (Boston, 1978), p.437
17. Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (New York, 1963), pp.312-3
18. In an attempt, as Churchill said, to "strangle at its birth" the infant Bolshevik state, the US launched tens of thousands of troops and sustained 5,000 casualties.
19. Mee, p.22
20. "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer", Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, Washington, DC, April 12, 1954 to May 6, 1954 (Washington, DC 1954), p.173
21. Weiner, op. cit.
22. Weiner, op. cit.
23. Bernstein, Diplomatic History, pp.66-8. This passage, actually written by Bundy for "On Active Service", was deleted from that book because of pressure from State Department official George F. Kennan.
24. Mee, p.239
25. Ibid., pp.288-9
26. United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific War), 1 July 1946, p.26
27. Edward Behr, Hirohito: Beyond the Myth (New York, 1989), chapter 24; The Guardian (London), June 18, 1983

William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

The deployment of United States Air Force (USAF) F-22 stealth fighter jets to a base on Japan's Okinawa island has prompted protests from residents.

The 12 aircraft were due to land at the island's Kadena airbase on Sunday but the US said they had turned back to Hawaii for operational reasons.

The jets are to be stationed on Okinawa for three months — the first time the jets have been deployed outside the US.

Hundreds of protesters were outside the base on Saturday to oppose the move.

The protest was peaceful, and no arrests were reported.

"I am protesting because the deployment of America's newest F-22 fighter jets runs counter to the principle of reducing (military) burden on Okinawa."

"So I made a placard and came out here," local resident Hiroshi Teruya, 66, told the Reuters news agency.

The fighters, built by Lockheed and nicknamed Raptor, are the newest and most expensive aircraft in the USAF arsenal.

The aircraft had originally been due to arrive on Saturday, but were delayed because of bad weather.

Some 50,000 US troops are based on the islands.

There have been recent protests from islanders unhappy at the US military presence.

The jets' deployment comes as the US continues to take part in six-nation talks in the Chinese capital, Beijing, aimed at bringing an end to North Korea's nuclear arms programme.

A protester holds a placard and raises his fists while shouting F.22 US Raptor jet go home during a rally in front of the gate of Kadena Air Base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa February 10, 2007 demanding to stop the deployment of F-22 war fighters to the base.

Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato

A protester holds a placard that says NO MORE NOISE during an rally in front of the gate of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa February 10, 2007 demanding to stop the deployment of war machine F-22 stealth Raptor fighters to the base.

The U.S. Air Force will deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor plane, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, to the base this weekend.

The deployment will be the first time that the war planes will be deployed to a base outside the U.S.

Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato

A U.S. Air Force war machine F.15 jet fighter taxis after returning to base, at Kadena U.S. Air Force Base in Okinawa, southwestern Japan February 11, 2007.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday postponed its plan to deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war jet fighter aircraft, on the base.

The deployment will mark the first time the plane is deployed in bases outside the United States.

Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters

Okinawa NEVER welcomes US forces.

Protesters attend a rally in front of the gate of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa February 10, 2007 demanding to stop the deployment of US war machine F-22 fighters to the base.

The U.S. Air Force will deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, to the base this weekend.

The deployment will be the first time that the war planes will be deployed to a base outside the U.S.

Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato

A U.S. Air Force F-15 war machine jet fighter taxis after returning to base, at Kadena U.S. Air Force Base in Okinawa, southwestern Japan February 11, 2007.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday postponed its plan to deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, on the base.

The deployment will mark the first time the war planes are deployed in bases outside the United States.

Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters

(left)

A missile being launched at Kwajelein atoll on the Marshall islands.

President George W. Bush submitted a 439.3 billion dollar defense budget to Congress, seeking a seven percent boost in
military spending without taking into account the full cost of a protracted war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

(right)

F-22 Raptor jet.

Photos: US Army-HO, USAF-HO

We object to deployment of F.22 war machine Raptor fighters.

Remove Kadena base promptly.

A protester holds the banner with the above words during an rally in front of the gate of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa February 10, 2007 demanding to stop the deployment of US war machine F-22 stealth Raptor fighters to the base.

The U.S. Air Force will deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, to the base this weekend.

The deployment will be the first time that the war planes will be deployed to a base outside the U.S.

Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato

NO F 22 GO HOME.

A protester holds a placard saying NO F22 GO HOME during an rally in front of the gate of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa February 10, 2007 demanding to stop the deployment of US war machine F-22 stealth Raptor fighters to the base.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday postponed its plan to deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, on the base.

The deployment will mark the first time the war planes are deployed in bases outside the United States.

Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters

A U.S. war machine Air Force F-15 jet fighter taxis after returning to base, at Kadena U.S. Air Force Base in Okinawa, southwestern Japan February 11, 2007.

The U.S. Air Force will deploy the war machine F-22 stealth Raptor, the most advanced U.S. war fighter aircraft, to the base this weekend.

The deployment will be the first time that the war planes will be deployed to a base outside the U.S.

Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato

Putin attacks very dangerous US

"One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way."

Earlier German chancellor Angela Merkel told the delegates in Munich that the international community was determined to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

"This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law," the Russian President said, speaking through a translator about the US.

"This is nourishing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons."

Western leaders in the audience, including Mrs Merkel, looked decidedly glum-faced when President Putin had finished.

"What we are talking about here is a very, very sensitive technology, and for that reason we need a high degree of transparency, which Iran has failed to provide, and if Iran does not do so then the alternative for Iran is to slip further into isolation," Merkel had said before Putin spoke.

The IAEA in the pocket of the West and other warring Western nations announced it had frozen about half of technical aid projects involving Iran.

The IAEA gives technical aid to dozens of countries on the peaceful use of nuclear energy in fields such as medicine, agriculture and power generation.

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. "It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."

According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force Japan to surrender.

The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid end to the war without the need for a costly US invasion.

But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.

They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombings.

Looking for peace

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims.

Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace".

Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden.

Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.

Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London, UK. He says that Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the circumstances".

Truman's main aim had been to end the war with Japan, Freedman says, but adds that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the bombing may not have been militarily justified.

Some people assumed that the US always had "a malicious and nasty motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so."

The 60th anniversaries will inevitably be marked by countless mass media commentaries and speeches repeating the 60-year-old mantra that there was no other choice but to use A-bombs in order to avoid a bitter, prolonged invasion of Japan.

On July 21, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when it reported that two historians had uncovered evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, Washington's war-time ally] rather than end the Second World War”.

Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington stated that US President Harry Truman's decision to blast the cities “was not just a war crime, it was a crime against humanity”.

With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR.

They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”.

His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb.

But the bombs were dropped anyway.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war", Selden told the New Scientist.

While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' 'theory' 'controversial', it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing”.

Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.

“The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to sweep away the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers'ruthless preparedness to use it.

These terrible acts were intended to warn the leaders of the Soviet Union that their cities would suffer the same fate if the USSR attempted to stand in the way of Washington's plans to create an “American Century” of US global domination.

Nuclear scientist Leo Szilard recounted to his biographers how Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes, told him before the Hiroshima attack that “Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might and that a demonstration of the bomb may impress Russia”.

Drunk from the success of its nuclear bloodletting in Japan, Washington planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons on at least 20 occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, only being restrained when the USSR developed enough nuclear-armed rockets to usher in the era of “mutually assured destruction”, and the US rulers' fear that their use again of nuclear weapons would led to a massive anti-US political revolt by ordinary people around the world.

Washington's policy of nuclear terror remains intact.

The US refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict.

Its latest Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear 'rogue states' and it is developing a new generation of 'battlefield' nuclear weapons.

Fear of the political backlash that would be caused in the US and around the globe by the use of nuclear weapons remains the main restraint upon the atomaniacs in Washington.

On this 60th anniversary year of history's worst acts of terror, the most effective thing that people around the world can do to keep that fear alive in the minds of the US rulers is to recommit ourselves to defeating Washington's current 'local' wars of terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The A Bomb Dome, the former Trade Promotion Hall, near the epicentre of the blast, is the only building still standing from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945

Keiko Ogura tried to help the many injured after the bombing

Keiko Ogura was eight years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.She still lives in the city.

I wanted to go to school, but my father said ' I have a very strange feeling today — you shouldn't go to school, stay with us'.

That morning I was on the road near the house and all of a sudden I saw a flash of blueish white light — a magnesium-like flash and soon after a big sound with dust, and I was blown away and fell on the ground.

I found myself lying on the ground near the house. I thought the house was just in front of me but I couldn't see it because everything had become so dark and many pieces of wood and roof tiles and rubbish were falling on my head.

And in the darkness there was a strong, strong wind like a typhoon. I couldn't open my eyes but tried to get back to my house and in the darkness I heard somebody was crying — my brother and sister.

I was 2.4km from the hypocentre but houses nearer the hypocentre had caught fire and were burning.

I saw long lines of refugees, just quiet, I don't know why they were so quiet. There were long lines, like ghosts.

Most of them were stretching out their arms because the skin was peeling off from the tips of their fingers. I could clearly see the hanging skin, peeling skin, and the wet red flesh and their hair was burned and smelled, the burnt hair smelled a lot.

And many people, just slowly passed by the front of my house.

Prayers at the Peace Park.

Parched

All of a sudden a hand squeezed my ankle. I was so scared but they said 'get me water'. Almost all the people were just asking 'water', and 'help me'.

I rushed into my home where there was a well and brought them water. They thanked me but some of them were drinking water and vomiting blood and [then] died, stopped moving. They died in front of me. I felt regret and so scared. Maybe I killed them? Did I kill them?

And that night, 6 August, my father was so busy looking after the neighbours, but when he came back he said: 'Listen children — you shouldn't give water, some of the refugees died after drinking water. Please remember that.'

Then I felt so guilty, and I saw them many times in my nightmares. I thought I was a very bad girl — I didn't do what my father said — so I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anybody this story until my father died.

There was black rain falling, black rain mingling with ashes and rubbish and oil, something like that. It smelled bad and there were many spots on my white blouse — sticky, dirty rain.

In the morning people were moving, brushing away flies from their skin. My house was full of injured people.

But as a little girl I was so curious. I wanted to see what the city looked like. My house was at the bottom of a hill — I climbed up the hill, near our house, and then I saw the whole city. I was so astonished — all the city was flattened and demolished. I counted just a couple of concrete buildings.

In denial

The next day some of the buildings were still burning, and the next day, and the next day, and for three or four days I climbed the hill to see what the city was like.

I have a brother-in-law. He was living almost at the centre of the city — his family was very close to the hypocentre. Until now his family members were missing and he didn't want to recognise they were all gone, so he refused to say and report the family's names to the officials and he didn't want to visit Hiroshima.

Right now, he is living far away in Tokyo, and only last year he decided to report to Hiroshima city that his family members — his mother and sister — had passed away.

And there were so many people [who saw] so many dead or dying, but actually, most of them made up their mind not to tell anyone about what they saw.

This interview is from the series 'August 1945'BBC commemoration 2005

Atomic bomb, carried over Peace Memorial Park near the A Bomb Dome in Hiroshima.

In front is the Memorial Cenotaph with its Flame of Peace, which will burn for as long as there are nuclear weapons.

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.... This weapon is to be used against Japan ... [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. ... The target will be a purely military one... It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."

The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.

The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.